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We mentioned recently the rebound in Arctic ice levels compared to those found at the end of last summer; now that the 2013 minimum has been reached, Forbes' Alex Knapp points out that 2013's figures still show the 6th lowest ice extent in recorded history. "This pattern is expected to continue as average global temperatures continue to rise, leading to further Arctic Ice melts. The volume of sea ice – that is, how thick the Arctic ice is, has also been steadily declining over the same period. And although the charts above only go back to the 80s, the loss of sea ice began several decades prior to that. In 2011, a paper published in Nature estimating Arctic ice extent for the past 1450 years shows a sharp decline in Arctic ice beginning in the mid-20th century."

This would be funnier if it weren't completely retarded. Let me draw you a map. [photobucket.com]

I've explained enough times to want to make this short, but most of the ground up here is some variant on permanently frozen. At some point, all of that is likely to melt, and subside. We Alaskans know a lot about what that looks like, because if you build in the wrong way in the wrong place, you'll be filling out your cross-stitch with "Home Sweet Bog". Houses built on permafrost are built on stilts.

Also, while the Arctic is warming at a significantly greater pace [alaska.edu] than the rest of the world (1.6 degrees C up from last century, compared with.8 degrees C globally), the winters are still going to be cold as fuck (<-40) for a long time to come.

Plus, there's <1% of the land up in Alaska that's actually owned privately. The rest is owned either by the Feds, the State, or the Natives.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg. Your suggestion, and its underlying premise, are so wrong-headed that it's turning my stomach. Perhaps you can go be a real estate agent in Shishmaref, [wikipedia.org] or one of the other villages that we're having to relocate due to climate change. Hopefully at that point you might understand exactly what it is that is offensive about your comment.

I think that you will find that he said that it could be ice free, not would. If there is one thing that you can safely say about scientists, it is that they avoid making outright statements when there is any significant margin of error.

It's funny how catastrophe is constantly being pushed to just over the horizon. Just far enough ahead, so that when the time comes and it doesn't happen, people wont remember the actual prediction. There's a guy with a beard and long hair in Times Square who's been doing the same thing for 20 years. The end is near!

And, again, the claim wasn't that the ice would be gone, it would be a summer extent. We'd get ice back.

Moreover, that's one guy.

Now what about other predictions that AGW would be falsified by 2012 being about the 1956 average? Your statement merely shows one man was wrong. Big deal. Doesn't disprove the general science which has there being no sea ice by maybe 2040. But deniers you DO listen to are wrong in damn near (95%+) all cases. Yet y

True, but you can make some deductions from biology. The existence of polar bears, not to mention their threatened status with receding ice, paints a picture of a lot of ice going way back: had there been no ice 100 years ago, there would be no polar bears. 100 years isn't time enough for them to evolve from brown bears.

So to answer your question. yes, you could say that "Canada was still frozen while Greenland was basking in warmth". Though temperatures slightly elevated in some parts of Canada, most of it was cold. And none of them were anywhere near as hot as they are now.

I looked at the article, and unfortunately its main point is based on work by Michael Mann. I wouldn't accept evidence from him of a cow farting. He did more to damage the reputation of "your side" than anyone else in these debates.

So, thank you for your time, but I have nothing to add to a discussion that is based on Michael Mann.

No, you have the wrong post. I'm not saying amaurea is a bad person, and I'm not saying Michael Mann is a bad person.

I'm saying Michael Mann was shown to be a bad scientist, and has damaged the AGW-believer side of this issue with remarkably poor science. I'm saying I don't trust anything he says, because of his prior bad science which not only is he not ashamed of, but which has his supporters twisting in logic knots to maintain. Name the people on the non-AGW side who have done such acts, and I will conde

It was only later that the climate cooled, and they were forced to change their lifestyle, and finally leave Greenland.

My favourite author, Jared Diamond, had an entire chapter on the Greenland Norse in his book Collapse [wikipedia.org]. They are remarkable because many factors impacted them at the same time, and their demise was due to climate, international politics, and their own stupidity.

Climate did get colder, but the Norse also lost their most important export, walrus tusks, because the Muslims started trading elephant tusks again with the Christians after several centuries of embargo: no one wanted walrus tusks anymore. Also, the Norse had apparently a phobia for fish, which for some reason they were unwilling to eat (or were unable to catch). They were also horrible diplomats and could not have friendly relations with the Inuit (who arrived in Greenland after the Norse), who eventually displaced them. Also, they were a very religious and conservative society, using relatively enormous resources to build a cathedral that could rival that of Nidaros in Norway.

When it was that warm in Greenland, it was certainly warm in Canada and Alaska.

That's a way too bold statement. Latitude is not the only predictor of temperature. I live at the same latitude as Anchorage, AK, but out temperature average is 5-10 degrees Celsius higher because we are exposed to the Gulf stream. Climate change does not have the same uniform effects in every spot.

Besides for all that IIRC "Greenland" was a real estate scam like "Quiet Sylvan Resort Acres Nice Trees and Wildlife Developement" is really crappy townhouses in a ghetto next to a railroad track and down the street from the toxic waste dump.

It was only later that the climate cooled, and they were forced to change their lifestyle, and finally leave Greenland.

My favourite author, Jared Diamond, had an entire chapter on the Greenland Norse in his book Collapse [wikipedia.org]. They are remarkable because many factors impacted them at the same time, and their demise was due to climate, international politics, and their own stupidity.

Climate did get colder, but the Norse also lost their most important export, walrus tusks, because the Muslims started trading elephant tusks again with the Christians after several centuries of embargo: no one wanted walrus tusks anymore. Also, the Norse had apparently a phobia for fish, which for some reason they were unwilling to eat (or were unable to catch). They were also horrible diplomats and could not have friendly relations with the Inuit (who arrived in Greenland after the Norse), who eventually displaced them. Also, they were a very religious and conservative society, using relatively enormous resources to build a cathedral that could rival that of Nidaros in Norway.

Yes, that was a problem, and is explained in the article I linked. It didn't mention the Muslims selling elephant tusks, so thanks for filling in that blank about why the Greenland Norse couldn't sell walrus tusks anymore.

When it was that warm in Greenland, it was certainly warm in Canada and Alaska.

That's a way too bold statement. Latitude is not the only predictor of temperature. I live at the same latitude as Anchorage, AK, but out temperature average is 5-10 degrees Celsius higher because we are exposed to the Gulf stream. Climate change does not have the same uniform effects in every spot.

I should have used a modifier there. When it was that warm in Greenland, before the Little Ice Age cooled everything down, it was certainly warmer in Canada and Alaska than it was during the Little Ice Age.

That I will stand on, because I don't accept the theory I've seen put forth by other

Yeah...you might just want to stop trotting out the "threatened status with ice" bit. There's no shortage of the bloody things, if anything there are more every passing year and their range of liveable area keeps expanding. In fact, there have been more than a few clashes between brown and polar bears in the last few years. As a fun point, we have them here in Ontario, and not all that far outside of the "southern half" of the province. And they range south, even in the summer here. There have been war

You might want to ask yourself why there are more clashes between polar and brown bears... Maybe something along the lines of them losing their habitat and having to spread... No, that can't be it. They must be in cahoots with those damned liberal scientists. Hint: Measuring a populations' behaviour from outside the population isn't going to help anyone learn anything. Listen to the scientists who actually study this stuff and see what they say. Another hint: They disagree with you.

I did ask myself that very question. What could possibly cause increased contact between humans and polar bears? And it dawned on me that if their numbers were becoming smaller, contact between them and humans would be rarer and rarer even if they are pushed out of one ecosystem. You can not have contact with a species that basically does not exist. In that sense, the best bet is to indeed look to the experts and see what they say.

You are still thinking too short a time period. I am thinking 1,000, 10,000 and 100,000 years ago. What happened in the last 500 years is still to short a time to say that ice loss similar to what is happening now has not happened before and without the help of man.. Recorded history is a snap of the fingers in geologic time.

They didn't evolve from Brown Bears. They transformed from Cartesian Bears:)We may as well just laugh because the science deniers have even more of a problem with evolution than they do with the climate changing. Both argue against a perfect unchanging world since day 7 which Christianity-Lite likes to pretend is the state of things.

That's rich. You seem to be making a claim that global warming deniers like to use an argument that requires the earth to be a static system when the reality is that the earth is not and has never been static and nobody cared until one day some scientists declared that the climate was not supposed to be changing but it is changing so it must be the fault of humans. It seems that the climate change crowd is the one demanding "an unchanging world."

Of course the problem with using polar bears as the measure is the fact that current estimates of polar bear population are massively higher than estimates for polar bear population in the 1950s. So, polar bear populations have RISEN over the last 60 years, yet global warming is threatening them with extinction?

Exactly. Because there are so many more polar bears now that we don't hunt them as much people might be inclined to allow more hunting of them and then their numbers will decline at which point hunting will be limited and their numbers will rise. Once the decline begins, the AGW crowd will use that as proof of their correctness. Once the rise begins, they will use the fact that they predict it will decline as proof of their correctness.

They're useful to geologists, and often to other scientists, sometimes, but not in this context.

Yes, pretty much no climate we could reach is really unprecedented on Earth. The ice ages are pretty cold. Other eras were quite hot and high in CO2. Hell, in still other eras, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere.

What's relevant is the climate of the last few thousand years and, to a lesser extent, the modern geologic era, because it's what our civilization is dependent on. Su

So it's the sixth lowest record in 35 or so such records. That's a bit underwhelming. And I find it interesting how the other replier goes on to say that ice volume is down significantly even though it is "hard to measure". It's interesting how much modern climatology relies on data that is hard to verify.

The idea that this year, following an extreme year, can be formally called regression toward the mean seems OK but it seem clearer to say something like a return to closer to the trend line. Anybody got a better description than that?

When this term is used for stocks it has a different sense because the statistics are far from normal. To quote the WP link above,

"In finance, the term mean reversion has a different meaning. Jeremy Siegel uses it to describe a financial time series in which "returns can be very unstable in the short run but very stable in the long run." More quantitatively, it is one in which the standard deviation of average annual returns declines faster than the inverse of the holding period, implying that the proces

Er, no, "how thick the ice is" is called "thickness". Volume is thickness times area (or more precisely, thickness integrated over area).

That said, two data points (last year's area and this year's area) do not a trend make. I can't believe how many people don't get that (or enjoy telling lies so much that they don't care that it contradicts reason).

You have to remember for the libertarians (the Heartland Institute's branch anyway) it's not really about the science it's about defending their ideology from an existential challenge. They believe that government is always bad and capitalism always good. The very idea of capitalism causing a massive global problem that can only be resolved by government intervention is unthinkable and thus must be false. The facts be damned, because they know the "The Truth of Capitalist Libertarianism" they know that AGW can not true.

Also, the Heartland Institute is funded by the true believers, so they will fight this to the last breath because both their identities and their jobs depend on it.

Hmmm...so what you are saying is that libertarians are a fragile species which might be on the brink of extinction due to political climate change and evolution of ideas. This is grave. Maybe we could enact a new government program to protect them as a species. We'll need to tag them and track their movements and observe their lifestyles. I doubt we could do this without significant increase in funding for science. Damn, I guess I'll have to stop shooting them too.

"Recorded History" on arctic ice extent is pretty damn short. The
National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) used to list something they
called the '1979-2001' average and then showed that, based on that, the
current ice extent was pathetically low. Lately, they have switched [nsidc.org] to
showing the '1981-2010' average because the early years of satellite
measurements have been found to be wildly inaccurate. Better
quality data has only been available since 2002 and, based
on that [uaf.edu], 2013 is the 6th highest ice exte

A formal calculation is one carried out using rules of arithmetic, without consideration of whether the result of the calculation is well-defined. Thus, it is sometimes useful to think of a/0, where a 0, as being \infinity. This infinity can be either positive, negative, or unsigned, depending on context.

Real projective line:

The set {R} U \infinity is the real projective line, which is a one-point compactification of the real line. Here \infinity means

Look, it's fine to disagree with with Ms Klein. I also don't agree with every line she writes. I decided to post the link because the GGGP was talking about left-wing propaganda, and I think this article does a fair job of at least showing the right-wing has far from clean hands in this department.

But then this brave AC saw fit to use a big word (wrongly) and proceeded to do exactly what that word usually derides. Viz, "nutbar", "w00w00s", "freaks".

Quoting The Nation as a source? Really? For those too uninformed to know what I mean, The Nation is nothing but the spigot out of which the Current Truth of radical socialist talking points runs. Seriously, it is pure propaganda. It says a lot that The Nation supports those who are promoting the man-made climate change narrative.

Honestly I think I speak for a number of us here. We don't care anymore about Ds or Rs.... They can all go fuck themselves with a red hot poker...

Hahaa....oh man. "Arrogance." Yes, that's how science works. A->B unless the Arrogance Coefficient is too high, in which case Zeus steps in and prevents B from happening because he hates human pride. Do you even listen to yourself talk?

I am going to assume then that you are one of those assholes who are so absolutely arrogant you feel you can do whatever you like and fuck the consequences for everyone else? Those people are usually labeled as criminals.

Only after they're caught, before they're caught they're usually called sociopaths, psychopaths, or CEOs...

Describes America's current CEO to a tee.And the last one.And the one before that.And the one....

wait.. what type of drugs/candy comes in bars that weigh killo's.... Cocaine and Hereon!!! The CIA runs both!!YEAH ME TOO I'll sign up for the mobile infantry TODAY! The only good person is a controlled and always watched person!!!

So you declare without proof that everyone who disagrees with the AGW narrative is paid by evil corporations? *yawn* So dissent from your side of a political disagreement can automatically be dismissed with no further thought?

No, in this particular case, it can be dismissed exactly because of all the thought, not to mention calculation and observation, that has already gone into it. There's this thing called science, and I'm aware it's very popular to dismiss, belittle or ridicule it, but bad PR is not refutation.

How convenient, especially since that talking point was invented by the dried-gourd rattling witch doctor, give-me-a-virgin-to-sacrifice hucksters who cooked up the AGW scam in the first place.

Because the deserts will spread, current areas which provide massive amounts of food will stop being able to do so (unless you want to move all the farmers thousands of miles across the world), the seas will heat and become more acidic, which will kill off or severely affect massive amounts of flora and fauna which live in and off the sea, including the massive amounts of plant life which converts CO2 into oxygen, which in turn will make the world warmer. Then the vast areas of permafrost across the world

And if police officers were investigating police officers for a crime that had been committed without a civilian SIU

I went to college at SIU. So WTF are you talking about? Southern Illinois University is the only SIU I've ever heard of, and googling your acronym brought up nothing but my alma matter. So what is your SIU? We're nerds, not cops.

Come on guy. Knowledge is not bestowed upon you by a holy power, just because you attended to some classes and had the privilege of shaking hands with famous "scientists". Anyone who wants to know about scientific process already knows about scientific process.

Furthermore, while scientists (or at least those who are labelled so) may be trained to adhere to the scientific method, with your logic, they can't know what it really is, since the nature and meaning of scientific method is not the subject of scienc

I'm not sure where you got that graph, but it doesn't match the official statistics from the NSIDC. There is absolutely a statistically significant trend in Antarctic ice, both in minimums and maximums. In fact, the minimum trend is even more pronounced than the maximum trend. Now, had you argued that the ice melt in the Arctic far exceeds the gains in the Antarctic (by about 3 times) I'd agree with you but as-is you are very much overly minimizing the gains in the Antarctic.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicen [nsidc.org]

It's below the long term average (by a million square km), and there are exactly two data points, so only a fool would consider that an upward trend. Also the years with lower ice extents [nsidc.org] are 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011 and 2012.

Oh, going straight for the "they're making us into communists!" scare? How about this: "finding ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions" is a long way from "all economic activity is controlled by the government".

When the "greenhouse gas" you are trying to reduce the emissions of is CO2 than no there is no distance at all between "finding ways to reduce greenhose gas emissions" and "all economic activity is controlled by the government" because ALL economic activity generates CO2 (all human activity generates CO2).

The task also appears partially hindered by the better safe than sorry attitude (among the scientists?) that we should skip the science and go straight to the cure.

I must point out that this is pretty standard risk mitigation, particularly given that reducing CO2 emissions will take many years. (The more the better, for economic reasons.) You're not supposed to wait for 100% confirmation of an impending disaster before taking steps to prevent it -- ask any insurance company. Had we started seriously trying to cut emissions 20-30 years ago, we'd be in a much better position now. Likewise, starting now is much better than waiting another ten years. And reducing fossil f

Toxic lights bulbs don't actually save as much power as they claim. The daylight saving time change actually resulted in more energy being consumed than saved. BUT that doesn't mean they were ineffective. They're having just the result desired, making people feel like they are doing something to solve the problems but having those same problems still around to force even greater changes.

DST was never about saving energy. It was about aligning workers to shifts for production in a manner that made sense for war time.

Yes, there are people that claim it would save energy - not burning candles at night when you could just get up a little earlier kind of thing; but it was really about making the most of the daytime for war efforts when enacted (WWII). It made sense for the manufacturing economies of that era, but now we run 24/7, so it really doesn't make sense any more.